Clean Rednecks Get Cookies
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Caryl, Oneshot. If Daryl takes a shower, he gets cookies.


**AN: So I saw a drawing prompt on Tumblr that was similar to this. Rather, it was the jumping off point for this. I had to do it. It's just a little one-shot for fun, so don't take it too seriously.**

 **I own nothing from the Walking Dead.**

 **I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!**

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The damned cookies were somewhere in the house. Daryl could still smell the scent that baking them had left hanging in the air and he knew that Carol had baked enough for an army. She always baked enough for an army.

But he couldn't find them anywhere.

He looked in the most obvious places. He turned over everything he could on the counters in the kitchen—a kitchen which he was starting to think was really far too large—and he found evidence of their future supper, but he found no dessert. He checked the fridge, wondering if she might think that they would spoil, but there weren't cookies there, and he rifled through every square inch of the cabinets and the pantry in search of one of the sealed bowls of treats.

But the cookies had disappeared.

Daryl could believe that Carol had given some of them away. It wasn't unusual to see her strolling around Alexandria, a basket in hand, giving out bowls and bags of the cookies as she went. It also wasn't unusual to see the children of Alexandria knocking at the door and begging treats that they knew that Carol would have to offer them.

Daryl could also believe that some of the people in the house had eaten through their fair share of the cookies already. He could believe that other members of their group—people who helped themselves to whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it—had eaten through some of the supply. He'd seen Michonne leaving her post earlier to go on her break and he knew that she could work her way through the cookies rather quickly. She wasn't the only one, either. He was on the late end for getting inside to get a snack.

But he couldn't believe they were all gone. Stacked up and drying by the sink were four washed baking sheets. Carol would have cycled them out, and there was no telling how many times she replaced each one in the oven. Knowing that she was the only person around Alexandria that ever even tried to make cookies, she would have made a sizable batch.

But where the hell had she put them?

After Daryl had torn the house apart in search of the cookies, he came to terms with the fact that he wasn't going to find them on his own. If he was going to have any hope of snagging some of them before they were gone, he was going to have to go to the source and ask, directly, about their whereabouts.

Finding Carol, however, wasn't going to prove much easier than finding the cookies. She was usually somewhere around the house, and more often than not in the kitchen or living room, or at least could be found by looking some short distance down the street in either direction—but today it was as though she'd disappeared. Daryl searched the downstairs and finally started upstairs. He stopped by Judith's room when he heard a tinkling noise coming from inside the small space. He pushed the door open and stuck his head in. In her crib, the baby was sleeping peacefully with a mobile playing above her head. If Judith was down for a nap, and nobody else was in the house, it meant that Carol had to be there somewhere.

Daryl finished his walk down the hall and stopped at the room that Carol called her own. The door was cracked and from outside Daryl could hear some noise coming from inside the room. Without thinking, and pleased simply with the fact that he'd found Carol, Daryl walked into the bedroom. He found the bathroom door ajar and heard, from inside the bathroom, the sound of running water. Judith was sleeping and Carol was seizing the opportunity to shower.

Daryl tapped lightly at the door, afraid to be too loud and accidentally wake the little girl.

"Carol?" He called as loudly as he dared. "Carol?"

He heard a muffled noise of some sort in response.

He stuck his head in the door to lessen the number of barriers that would keep them from hearing each other clearly.

"Carol?" He repeated. She didn't answer immediately. All sound had stopped beyond the running of the water. It almost led Daryl to believe that Carol, somehow, had left the water running and forgotten about her shower entirely while she'd gone to do something else.

But he was sure he'd heard some muffled response only moments earlier. Could something have happened that fast? Had she done something? Had she somehow hurt herself and now was at risk of doing something like drowning in the shower?

Before he could tell himself that his thoughts were probably just the result of his sometimes overactive imagination—the same one, perhaps, that had led him to believe that he saw a chupacabra—Daryl reached and yanked back the shower curtain.

If Carol had been hurt, she was better now. She also wasn't nearly as afraid of waking Judith as Daryl had been. She let out a scream that made Daryl back up, hurrying to cover his ears. The sound of her fear startled him so much that he barked out in response to her.

"It's just me!" Daryl yelled back at Carol.

The initial fear passing, Carol stopped screaming, but she looked no less shocked. She stared at Daryl and he found that he was staring right back at her. For a moment he was still trying to process exactly how he'd ended up there, in Carol's bathroom with Carol naked in front of him, but finally he felt like he was unthawing a little from the frozen state the screaming seemed to have left him in.

"What are you doing here?!" Carol barked back at him, not as loudly this time. There was no sound coming from anywhere else in the house, so it was safe to assume that their early outburst hadn't woken Judith.

"That's what I'm trying to remember!" Daryl responded, no less enthusiastically, but also paying attention to his voice enough that it wouldn't make it all the way down the hallway.

He'd come up there with a purpose—and it wasn't to disrupt Carol's shower in quite this way—but it had slipped his mind. In fact, at the moment, his mind felt very slippery. His eyes did too, because no matter how hard he tried, he wasn't looking at Carol's face any longer.

"Stop staring!" Carol scolded. To demonstrate that she thought he should do what she said, and stop looking at her body, Carol grabbed the shower curtain and pulled it half closed, almost wrapping it around her like a towel. It worked, however, and broke the trance that Daryl felt like her nipples had held him in for a moment.

"Sorry," he stammered out, not even attempting to voice which of his numerous transgressions he was trying to apologize for.

"What's wrong?" Carol asked.

"What?" Daryl asked.

"What's wrong?" Carol repeated. "What happened? Is something wrong? Is that—why you came barging in here?"

Her line of questioning further helped Daryl's somewhat clouded mind return to clarity. He shook his head at her.

"There's nothing wrong," he said. "I was looking for you."

"In the shower?" Carol asked. "Because you found me."

"I was looking for cookies," Daryl said.

Carol's expression changed. She looked as confused as Daryl felt.

"Cookies? In the shower?" Carol asked.

"I didn't think you had the cookies on you," Daryl said. "I just—thought you'd know where the hell they were. I turned the whole kitchen upside down and I couldn't find 'em so I thought you could tell me where they were. I didn't mean to come all the way in here—but then you didn't answer me back and I just..."

He broke off. He wasn't about to explain to her the fact that his mind could go from calm to disaster in two seconds flat. He nipped at his cuticle and stared at her, deciding to leave his explanation just where it was.

"You wanted cookies?" Carol repeated, her expression relaxing a little.

"You baked 'em," Daryl said.

"I know I baked them," Carol responded. "I wasn't expecting anyone to come and tear the curtain down around me, though, just for baking cookies."

Daryl swallowed. He could point out that she was being overdramatic and he'd hardly torn the curtain down, but something told him this wasn't the time for drawing attention to things like that.

"Sorry," he repeated, at a loss for other words.

Carol visibly relaxed more. Then she surprised him. She dropped the curtain that she was holding like a life-saving device and stood there, dripping and naked, revealed to him just as she'd been when he first walked in. Daryl's eyes, against his will, returned to staring at her. It was like they didn't belong to him. His brain could tell them not to look, but they seemed determined to memorize every single thing that they could—for _later_ , perhaps.

"Fair is fair," Carol said. "You've seen mine. I think—now you should show me yours."

Her words worked to get Daryl's attention again. His eyes snapped back to hers.

"Show you my _what_?" He asked.

"Yours," she said, waving her hand and raising her eyebrows at him like that was some kind of all-telling response. "You've seen everything I've got. Show me yours. Strip."

Daryl laughed nervously to himself.

"You're outta your damn mind," he said.

"You haven't left yet," Carol pointed out. "So—as long as you're staying, make good use of what's left of the hot water with me. Strip. You need a shower anyway."

"I was just leaving," Daryl said.

Carol smirked at him.

"And you still haven't moved," she said. She sucked in a breath and clearly held it. Daryl saw that the rise of her chest wasn't followed by the fall that the release of air would have brought about. "I baked those cookies," Carol said finally. "And everyone came at them like wolves."

"Like damn Walkers," Daryl said. Carol hummed in agreement.

"But I hid you some," Carol said. "Where nobody would find them. Not even you."

"Where?" Daryl asked.

Carol smiled.

"Take off your clothes," she said. "Take a shower. I don't bite. Unless—you _want_ me to."

Daryl found that swallowing, something he'd always thought to be a mindless act, was now not quite as mindless as it once had been. Part of him wanted to high tail it out of the bathroom as quickly as he could. The other part had a sudden and desperate desire to take a shower. His heart thundered in his chest.

"Take a shower?" He asked. "Just—take a shower. With you?"

Carol nodded. It looked like she was breathing a little faster than before. The quick rise and fall of her chest matched the way that Daryl's felt.

She'd made a million flirty jokes with him over the time that he'd known her. She'd teased him a million times. Now he wondered how much of it was really teasing.

What he was sure of, though, was that if he chose to walk out of the bathroom, Carol would let him. She'd let him turn and walk out the door and she'd never say another word to him about it. But that was the catch. If he walked out now? She'd never say another word to him about _any of it_.

Despite his short breath and the thundering of his heart, Daryl stripped out of his clothes. He kept his eyes on the floor and only looked up when he heard Carol make a noise that he couldn't identify. Still standing in her spot, as though moving might spook him now that he was bare-assed, Carol smiled at him and waved him into the shower.

"Come on," she said. "Shower won't be so bad. And when you're clean?" She broke off, but her smile grew as Daryl stepped into the shower. She backed up to give him a little more room. Her smile suggested she was much calmer than Daryl, but the quick rise and fall of her chest suggested that she was just a better liar. "When you're clean?" Carol repeated, "You can have cookies. Lots of cookies."

Despite his nerves, which were oddly starting to fade now that they were in the shower together and nothing equal to world destruction had taken place so far, Daryl was struck. He laughed to himself.

"What?" Carol asked.

"We still talking about food?" Daryl asked.

"That's up to you," Carol responded with a smile.


End file.
